"A melon full of green hair actually created a miracle!" During World War II, an ordinary vegetable shopping aunt accidentally got a moldy melon, but unexpectedly saved the world!
In World War II, many soldiers were seriously injured, and due to the backwardness of medical treatment and medicine, the wounds of these soldiers could only be simply disinfected with disinfectant water, because the wounds were infected and countless people died of fever!
At this time the British pharmacy student character Alexander. Fleming, who was a medical captain on the national team, discovered that there was a bad bacteria in the bodies of soldiers who died of infection, the common staphylococcus, which can cause fever if not treated in time.
"If only there was a bacterium that could kill the grape fungus without harming the human body!" Fleming thought. Since then, Fleming has searched for this bacterium in every possible way.
Fast forward to 1928, and finally there was an unexpected surprise!
This summer, the students of the research school were on summer vacation, and Fleming, who was already a professor, went on vacation because he did not have time to clean up the messy utensils in the laboratory.
When the weather cooled down, Fleming found that some utensils had mold in them, and he accidentally discovered that the substances secreted by mold could kill staphylococcus. This is the first antibiotic identified by humans, and this thing is a real cow! Fleming named him "Penicillin"
Unfortunately, penicillin was not clinically used at this time, because the dose extracted from the culture medium alone was too small! The amount of culture in a month can only save one patient, and the patient's urine has to be recovered to extract penicillin!
This was obviously a great invention, but it was delayed in its widespread application, and Feleming was disheartened.
But this can't go on, in order to treat more patients, later, the laboratory hired a woman, she did nothing all day to visit the vegetable market, buy vegetables, buy all kinds of moldy fruits and vegetables, for a long time, the market vendors knew this woman. People gave the nickname "Moldy Mary".
On this day in 1941, Mary was visiting the vegetable market as usual, she came to a fruit stall, saw a moldy melon, Mary was overjoyed: "The boss wants that melon!" , "That melon that is covered with "green hair" because of mold"! was taken back to the lab.
The "green-haired" melon lying in the corner immediately attracted the attention of laboratory researchers.
They thought the mold on this melon looked strange. After repeated experiments, Feleming found that the penicillium strain produced by "green melon" can increase the dose by more than two thousand times! This is really exciting news.
Later, Fleming and others continued to improve this mold, and finally penicillin (penicillin) was widely used all over the world!
During World War II, penicillin treated tens of millions of patients. Theoretically! All the penicillins in the world today come from the moldy melon that Mary bought, and they are all the offspring of that mold!
In that era, the price of penicillin was more than gold, and in the movie "Penicillin 1944", in order to compete for two boxes of penicillin, the two parties and Wang Puppet Army launched a life and death contest! During the war, the most terrible thing was not the fascist guns, but the infection of bacteria.
Great grocery shopping woman! Great moldy melon! In any event, an unexpected discovery will have a different surprise! It is with these accidental discoveries that many scientific inventions have been made!
Author: Shocked but not confused
Editor: Snow Lime
Source: Tencent News, "The Greatest Invention of Mankind: The Tortuous History of Penicillin"
#头条创作挑战赛 #
